2017-12-09

Frozen!

I am glad to be back home in the warm as I have spent all day from early hours at the office with no power (and hence no heat). The alarm system can only run on batteries for so long...

In spite of the cold, it was fascinating watching the guys from SSEN diagnose and work on the fault outside the A&A offices today. The power went off, well, mostly, last night. Actually all three phases (we only use one) went to around 40V, so some things still managed to blink the odd light.

They dug a hole by the road last night, and confirmed the power was fine there...

So this morning they dug a hole in our car park...

They took out one of the water mains...

Which caused a lot of delay as they had to stop the water and empty the hole full of water before exposing some of the electricity...

They also found our fibre connection, but managed to do so without breaking it, phew... (the grey pipe)

The dismantling of the cable was interesting, and they were slightly shocked to find the aluminium sheath was live :-) The rubber gloves came out quite quickly.

They checked the cable and found it was faulty, meaning the fault is between the two holes. However, this means they can isolate it and connect us to a big generator truck...

So now we have power, and they even fixed the water...

Yes, Sandra got them all coffee.

So we can look forward to them finding the fault next week, and then jointing us back on to mains power at some point, which I am guessing is going to take an hour or so. Time to order a UPS.

Obviously we set up calls to go to mobiles so staff could handle customer enquiries for normal hours of operation today.

5 comments:

We have a fairly hefty UPS at work from Eaton - three phase jobby. Only have enough runtime for about 20mins, and it fills half a rack. Was quite a scramble last time the power went out (I was sat on the throne at the time, quite annoying, luckily had my phone handy to provide light at the right time!), in order to shut all the vHosts down from the console. Had about half a dozen of us in there for 15mins all plugging away...

You can't, in property deeds utility companies have easements over the land under which their services pass so you have to grant them access to the land to do whatever they need to, whenever they like. And as long as they eventually restore the land to as it was before, (as best you reasonably can) then there's no come back

Live sheath = lost neutral and on TNCS its a good job you were only using one phase, as it is quite likely you would have suddenly found yourself with something well in excess of 240 Phase <> Neutral if there was any imbalance and some very broken kit...

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